Preparation
Saturday's show was pretty great. We got to see some awesome bands, play some new songs, and enjoy a generally awesome afternoon. I think that it also marked the first show for which we were excessively prepared.
Hot Apollo has a long history of pulling things together at the last moment. In the week before our first actual show, we lost two bassists and a drummer. The bassist we got actually had to learn all of the songs on the night before the gig. With all of that, we still managed to play a good set. We've had a lot of experiences like that, and we've made some strides towards adequate preparation since. This weekend was an unusual one, though.
The set time we were given was slightly longer than what we usually get, and we didn't have time to pull together people for a full electric set. That left us with the task of adapting some extra songs into acoustic versions. Various life circumstances and a fracture in the guitarist's leg meant that most of this had to be done on the day before the show. We're no strangers to this kind of thing, though. We arranged a solid set, and an awesome new song even got written when I accidentally played a recording of some humming I'd made before bed in the preceding week. Things were set.
Unfortunately, things on the day of the show got slightly chaotic, and we were forced to cut our time down. I think that we managed to play two thirds of what we had in the end. They were two awesome thirds, though, and that incident of excessive preparation was a surprising new experience for us.
Bonus Question!
Best swamp punk? Alan Moore.